


Snakes in the Grass

by Cramp



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-16 22:44:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3505508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cramp/pseuds/Cramp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not all the trolls in the Horde were happy when Vol'jin turned his back on the cause of the Troll Empire. This is the story of one of them, Serat Whiteface.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Masks in Moonlight

It was not a good time to be asking questions.

Tensions were high in Orgrimmar and there was a kind of war being fought. Not with knives and strength of arms, though those were known to flash steel cold and blood hot in the night, but rather with whispered words and hushed arguments. 

Every dawn the ochre arroyos of the troll valley would be splashed with the yellow staring eyes of the Warchief or scrawls of trollish glyphs screaming “Empire”. Braves and headhunters loudly proclaimed their allegiance to the Shadowhunter by wearing his colours, while others furtively decked themselves in the fetishes of the primal gods or southern loas, making common cause with their forest and jungle cousins. 

Drunken fights became more frequent, even for Orgrimmar, and the presence of orc guards or out-and-out Garrosh loyalists more obvious. The New Horde had little patience for turncloaks and dissenters, no matter what their grievances. The careful ones slid into the shadows.

This kind of intrigue did not come naturally to the trolls – it was more suited to the backroom politicking of the sin’dorei or the cold cunning of the goblins – but they learned quickly. 

*

They gathered on one of the many bluffs that surrounded the City of Spikes. It was not an easy climb, and surely that put off some who might offer wisdom to the proceedings, but they had to keep themselves hidden from prying eyes.

Someone had built a small fire, spluttering fitfully, and a pair of hexed rat ears burned blue, a middling charm to muffle any sounds from the circle. There were a good few of them there, ranging from muscled young with their warrior’s mohawks, to older longtusks, still huffing from the climb.  
Serat breathed heavily behind his wooden mask. He could feel the sweat beading on his upper lip despite the coolness of the night air. If the Kro’kon caught them they would have few qualms in throwing them upon the Warchief’s infamous mercy. If it came to that, Vol’jin’s shadowhunters were not likely to be any more gentle by anyone’s reckoning. 

‘We gotta stop sitting on the shore on this. Big things are happening and if we ain’t careful we’ll end up missing the boat entirely. The world will change and the Darkspear won’t,’ a man was saying, gesturing insistently with his arms. ‘All respect to Vol’jin, he’s led us true to now but even the best of us can make a mistake, be blinded by personal bonds. This is too big, too important to miss out on. We gotta chance.’ He opened his hand. ‘Many tribes,’ the fingers closed into a strong fist, ‘One Empire.’

He backed down, crouching as a woman stepped forward. Serat felt the shift around him. Orcs had changed the trolls, gutted their traditions, but not of all of it had been for the worse, even he could see that, but it didn’t mean there weren’t old habits. The masks, apart from hiding their identities from each other, did mean that everyone spoke with the same weight.

‘I hear you brother, I do. But these tribes you want to be brothers with… this ain’t Raventusk or Skullsplitter across the water, or even the Smolderthorn. This is Gurubashi! Blood drinkers brother,’ she appealed to them from behind the visage of a god. ‘I want to see trolls rised up, got up from underfoot, ‘course I do. But it ain’t so long since they were trying to pull Hakker into this world. Woulda fed us all to the Soulflayer.’

‘It ain’t just the Gurubashi, sister. Can you fault the Amani for staying true? Or the Zandali? We all got black in our pasts, our whole history is about trying to kill each other. Spirits know I got bad blood with half the tribes out there. But look where it’s got us!’ The speaker spread his arms wide, ‘Halfway round the world from our island mother and jumping right quick at the orders of some orc we don’t know.’ He clenched his fist and Serat could hear the faith in his words. ‘We’re the First People, dammit! There ain’t no step taken on any land that ain’t placed in the footprint of a troll. Yet we shelter in a city made by a clan not even from this world.’ He paused, head lowered. ‘Look what the orcs had done by becoming one Horde. You don’t think that we can’t do more? Can’t do better?’

Serat nodded. This is what he had come to hear, the pride in his people that he had felt was missing, ever since that day they had been scattered from their home by the slithering foe. 

‘What is it then? We really gonna start sticking spears into our allies?’ another troll started and Serat could see that some around the circle appeared to have no qualms with the suggestion. ‘We fought with them, lay with them, died with them. Got to be honour in that.’

‘Hey now, I ain’t got troubles with the Horde, they’ve done us good over the years – can’t deny that,’ he patted down some complaints, ‘You can’t. But now we have a chance to clear a path made by trolls,’ there was a pregnant pause, ‘They just gotta know not to be in the way of that path.’

There it was. Anyone listening had to hear those as treasonous words, no matter how gently couched they had been. They made Serat’s palms itch. He knew the kind of talk there would be, that’s why he had come after all, but it was quite different to whisper euphemisms over jungle wine and another to hear it plainly said. 

‘So this is it. What are we going to do? How far is too far and what ain’t enough. Otherwise, all we’re doing,’ the speaker made a puppet of his fingers and jabbered the mouth open and close, ‘…is parrot words.’

How many were there, Serat wondered, who weren’t like this handful. That had heard the call of the Zandalar and felt the fire in their chest but did not know how or who to talk of it. That’s what it all depended on – this strategising- the belief that the great majority of Darkspear wanted what they wanted. It wasn’t the first meeting like this he had been to, and he was beginning to notice the familiar forms of the attendees. One wearing the red face of Ogoun had caught his eye. Often quiet, he spoke with a cool decisiveness that Serat admired. 

Someone wearing a snake face was speaking. He was a moderate, wanted to take the message down into the valley and move the tribes with words, push Vol’jin to take them to Empire by force of will. Let the Horde go one way, the trolls another.

It wasn’t popular talk and the speaker was hissed and scoffed to silence. The people round the fire were there because they were tired of words, they wanted to do something to be part of the movement.

*

By the time the meeting ended, the fire had almost burnt down, the rat ears nothing more than ash. Nothing had been resolved and very little ventured. There were firm in their resolve but it was not all that they needed, Serat could see that much. The trolls disappeared off the bluff in drips and drabs, finding a myriad number of ways to return to the city or Sen’jin. 

A few of them remained, forming a small group around Ogoun.

‘I think you know what I’m going to say…’ the troll started, stroking his neck while meeting each of their gazes one by one. ‘This is all well and good, knowing why we are doing what we’re doing. But I can sense you see it. This ain’t gonna take us nowhere without some kind of leadership.’

Serat held his breath, forced himself to appear calm, hands resting on his knees.

‘Well, there is someone out there with a plan. A good plan. But they need braves with the strength of will to carry it out.’

He shook his head, fetishes clicking quietly in his hair. ‘I ain’t gonna tell you that no one is gonna get hurt, cause it would be a lie. And I won’t tell you that the Horde will thank you for it, ‘cause they won’t. But ask yourself, does your loyalty lie to that chief?’ He pointed in the direction of Orgrimmar’s central spire. ‘Or to that one?’ His arm rose to point in the other direction, towards the Echo Islands. ‘Or does it lie with the trolls that are and all those that will be? ‘cause it’s them you’ll be doing this for.’

He raised a palm to quieten them before they could speak.

‘You don’t need to say anything to me. This bears thinking about. Real thinking. Once you’re with us then you’re with us. If this sounds like what you’ve been looking for then in three days we’ll meet again. Go across the river to Ratchet. If not, don’t and that’ll be that.’

He rose, nodding for them. 

‘Oh, and should you come, leave off the masks.’

 

  



	2. Tigers and Tin Streets

The torrential rain hammered the rivets and corrugated iron of Bilgewater Bay. The clouds were granite-grey and just as heavy, rolling low in the air and closing the lid over the metal streets.

Serat huddled under the eaves of the house, his long pale arms hugging his chest. He was drenched right through, his white hair flattened to his skull and even his specially treated paints beginning to run, turning his already fearsome death mask into something nightmarish. The rain in the goblin town was loud, louder even than the pattering applause of drops on the broad flat leaves in Stranglethorn. It hid things – a curtain of sound and water, masking the predators in its midst. He was not blind, he had seen the looks he and his partner had been given, heard the stories of the slaves that had been buried in the mines of Kezan. Here the tigers may hunt on two legs and the serpents’ poison may be carried in their words, but they were no less dangerous for it.

The proof of that lay in the house behind him.

The small door opened with a rusty creak and a trollish finger beckoned him in. Serat swiped the water from the bald crown of his head and obeyed.

‘There ain’t much to look at, and they are definitely not here,’ said his partner, Jese’Rai.

They had been assigned to the job together back in Ratchet with the hope that their skills would complement each other on the mission. Unlike Serat, she was bulky with one tusk cut away and permanent crooked grin where a human had tried to slice her jaw off. His finger bones hung on a knotted string around her neck.

They hadn’t spoken much but she seemed a good sort, quiet and dependable if not imaginative.

Serat nodded and crouched low. He swept his thumb through the sticky puddle of congealing blood and brought it up to his mouth, tongue licking it up thoughtfully.

Fresh. Whoever had murdered Thrott Thunderjoy had done it during the storm.

‘What are we gonna do, Serat?’

*

It was a simple job, the troll who had been Ogoun told them, an easy pick up to cut their teeth on. But they both knew it was a test of their loyalty. They were to go to Bilgewater Bay and pick up a package from a goblin engineer. They were given the gold to pay him and then it was just a matter of bringing the package back to Ratchet to be smuggled into Orgrimmar.

Ogoun seemed pleased that neither of them asked what was going to be in the package or where the gold to pay the goblin had come from. Serat knew when to keep mouth shut and he supposed that Jese’Rai just did not have the imagination to worry about those kind of details.

They took a gnomish trawler to Aszhara, Jese’Rai hauling the sack of gold hidden somewhere on her muscular body while Serat squinted over the waves. They were nothing too unusual or out of place, just two more of the Horde as a loose end and wanting to spend their coin in Bilgewater. The goblins had not just brought their numbers and engineering to the Horde, but also their notions of leisure and excess. The tribal Horde were intoxicated by the new games of chances and the goblin approach to alcohol. It was no shock to see normally dour and professional orc soldiers passed out in the streets of Bilgewater with their coin pouches emptied on things they could barely remember. The goblins must have seen themselves as small but toothy sharks, hunting the large, slow moving porpoises of the fiscally naive Horde. It was true that there were fewer trolls, but not few enough to pass comment at the arrival of two more.

And anyway, it wasn’t as if they were planning to stay very long.

*

What were they going to do? Serat didn’t have much of a clue. Bilgewater might not have been huge, but it was a labyrinth of twisting streets and blind alleyways, tiny houses popping up like mushrooms from the oppressive metal. There were no friendly hearths here and no one to tell them what to do. And there was no way they could return to Ratchet and tell Ogoun that they had failed at the first hurdle.

‘Serat?’ Jese’Rai hissed again, peering out from a crack in the door.

‘I’m thinking here!’ he spat back, clenching and unclenching his hands.

‘Think faster then, we don’t wanna be caught with a dead bomb maker.’

Bomb maker? Serat lifted his gaze and for the first time really looked at the equipment that filled the goblin’s home like so much trash. Clockwork mechanisms, wires, jars and metal parts all haphazardly stored and a cold shiver ran up the troll’s spine as he realised what Jese’Rai had immediately spotted, that Thrott was sitting on a house full of a goodly amount of explosives.

‘Least we know what we’re lookin’ for now I guess,’ the warrior said, her fingers squeezing the hilt of her sword.

Serat grunted and turned back to the problem they had, namely the dead goblin. Slowly a possible solution began to coalesce like so much smoke in his mind and he patted his pouches, grinning when he felt the familiar hard shape filling one of them.

‘Jese’Rai, pass me some of them wires.’

To her credit, the warrior didn’t even ask what he was doing, just snatched up a handful of short, malleable wires he had indicated, placing them at his side while he fished into his pouch, pulling out the tooth of a raptor he had killed some weeks ago.

He worked quickly, settled now on the course of action, placing the tooth on the puddle of blood while his fingers moved in practiced ways, twisting and shaping the wires together. Steadily a crude raptor figure began to take shape, necked stretched out in the hunt. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Jese’Rai moving around the workplace, picking up items and putting them in new configurations.

He didn’t often work with metal, more used to twigs and twine, but he found the wires moved well under his broad fingers, taking on the shapes he wanted without too much resistance.

Carefully he took the blood sheathed tooth and placed it into the poppet, feeling the whirl of eager excitement of the raptor spirit as it sniffed the ether, already trying to follow the blood trail. He kept an iron grip on it though, to release it now would have it disappear from his control and he couldn’t afford that just yet.

‘This gonna take much longer, Serat?’ Jese’Rai said, winding some mechanism.

Serat ignored the question, pulling a long strand of his hair and quickly tying a noose in the delicate white hair. With skills borne of long practice he looped the noose over the neck and felt the buck as the spirit chomped against his mastery.

‘We’re done,’ he said, holding the poppet in one hand and leash in the other.

‘Good, ‘cause so is this place. We ain’t coming back here.’

Serat nodded without understanding and they both ducked through the door and back into the punishing downpour. He gave a little slack to the hunter spirit and it tugged to the right, and he beckoned the warrior woman to follow him.

And then suddenly she was close to his side, her hard body crushed against him, grabbing his arm in a vice-tight grip and bundling him forward, Serat almost stumbling to keep up with her long strides. He shot her a dark, questioning look, but Jese’Rai was looking dead ahead with a determined expression and she led him round a random series of corners and turns, no matter the insistent leads of the bound spirit.

‘What are you doing?’ he hissed, trying to tear his arm from her grip, but she only twisted his arm and tugged him along.

‘Keep going and don’t look startled, whatever happens,’ was her only command and Serat growled in frustration. He was meant to be the one leading this expedition and here he was being dragged around like a petulant whelp.

Then there was an earthshaking boom, a thunderclap that seemed to make the road heave beneath his feet and Serat would have cried out if Jese’Rai hadn’t slapped her free hand hard against his chest and knocked the breath from his lungs. Goblins appeared in doorways, eyes wide and ears twitching as they looked to the black cloud that poured down its own rain of debris.

Only then did Serat realise what Jese’Rai must have done to cover their tracks, her fiddling with the paraphernalia of the bomb maker’s craft. Any objections died in his throat and he looked at the disfigured troll with a new sense of admiration, even through the numbness in his arm.

‘Now,’ she said quietly, eyeing the rush of goblins towards the bomb maker’s house. ‘Now, we can follow your charm.’

*

If Serat had thought he was wet before, he was truly soaking now.

They trail of murder led his hunter spirit and the two trolls to a dead end alleyway on the edges of the island town, and the slowly spinning knife of a gold-toothed goblin.

The two groups eyed each other up; three goblins, one dressed in the outlandish finery of a goblin money maker, purple leggings and a yellow jerkin studded with gold coins, and the other two in the far more down to earth tough leather and chain of bruisers, the heavy maces of their namesake held tight in meaty fists. And they faced by two trolls, the woman with shoulders and arms bulked with muscle, giving her the look of a forest troll if it was not for her sky blue colouring, and the male rope thin and ghost white, red eyes like pools of fresh blood.

‘Nice trick with the explosion, done good work for covering my tracks that you have, my friends,’ said the Goblin in a rakish orcish, tipping his feathered hat at them.

Neither of the trolls said anything for the moment, though Serat noted that goblins were wont to call everyone but their actual friends “my friend”.

‘I was just on my ways to sending a runner to you two, thought that you might want to do some business.’ With that the goblin stood up and pulled the box that he had been sitting on up to their gaze. It was a long rectangle, thin and wooden, nailed shut and with warning signs stamped up and down its length.

‘Done you a favour I have. Thrott was banging on about a big payday coming to every bunny willing to sit on he’s lap. That ain’t good business now is it?’ asked the goblin, looking at them earnestly.

Serat met Jese’Rai’s eyes and tried to puzzle out what she was thinking. It would not do to come into this with separate purposes, not when everything was at stake. His gaze flicked to her hands quickly and he noted they were purposely nowhere near the hilt of her weapons. Talking then. He straightened up and shaped his mouth around the orcish words.

‘Ah tink you’ve got somethin’ for us?’ He said, nodding his head at the box.

The goblin grinned like he had just been greeted by a long lost lover.

‘That depends, yes it does! Do you have something for me?’

At his side, the bruisers leered and patted the heads of their maces into their open hands.

Serat shrugged with one shoulder, ‘Jus’ wat was agreed, no more en no less.’

‘That suits me just fine. I ain’t a greedy man. Just what you promised dear ol’ departed Thrott will please me more than enough.’

Serat turned to Jese’Rai, who was grinning at one of the bruisers, but then, he supposed she didn’t really have a choice in the matter.

‘Let’s pay de man den,’ he told her, throwing a thumb loosely at the goblin hustler.

The warrior gave a lopsided frown and grunted, turning away from their eyes and wriggling a bit as she reached into whatever nook she had hidden their stash of gold.

‘Big lass you’ve got there, friend. Know some folk that appreciate that in a woman,’ said the goblin to Serat as they waited. He just returned a blank, fishy stare.

Eventually Jese’Rai pulled free the pouch and held it out. Serat felt his hackles rising. He didn’t know much about doing things like this, but even he could see that now the money had been washed up, it would be the perfect time for the goblin to try something. He edged one hand slowly behind his back, feeling the hilt of one of his daggers that were sheathed up along his back. The goblin murderer edged closer, reaching out with one hand, the box hanging from his other fist. Soon he was within reach. Serat knew that he could swipe his dagger across the villain’s throat in a flash should he try anything. His breath was caught in throat, like he was breathing through a thin reed and his eyeballs throbbed.

But he just snatched at the money bag as he thrust the package into Jese’Rai’s hand and then backed away, crab-like and scuttling, already pinching open the pouch and peering inside.

‘Yes yes yes, that will do, that will do indeed my friends. All good in Bilgewater, no harm done, no blood spilt.’ The goblin grinned, a golden smile. ‘Well, apart from poor young Thrott of course, but eggs and omelettes and that.’

Neither Serat nor Jese’Rai said anything in reply. The troll woman just hefted the package and nodded at Serat, who nodded back. The sooner they could leave behind the poisonous grin, the better Serat would feel and the sooner they could get off this damned cauldron of a town.

*

But as soon as they were out of sight of the goblins, Jese’Rai touched him on the shoulder.

‘Serat, we gotta go back,’ she said, her husky voice set with determination.

‘What? Why? We got the package, goblins got their gold. Who cares which green one we gets it from, so long as we got it.’

She shook her head. ‘They’re a loose end, Serat. Thrott might had been loose tongued and they sorted him, but he ain’t got no reason to be loyal to us. Probably thinking of how to best sell us out right now.’

Serat pushed his fingers hard against his eyes. He didn’t like having to think like this, like everyone was waiting to push a foot of steel into his back. But he knew Jese’Rai was right, had been right most of the damn mission.

‘Now?’ he asked wearily.

‘Right now. We wait too much longer and they gonna be gone like they never were.’

‘What if someone sees us?’

The warrior’s expression was set and Serat could see how she must have looked when facing a line of the enemy. Dangerous. Even had she not had the scar cutting her face she would have looked dangerous.

‘We’ll do it quickly, before they can make a sound.’

‘But there’s three of them, Jese’Rai. Can we do three before one of them lets out a scream?’

She nodded quickly, turning him around and pushing him on. ‘Here’s how we’ll do it...’

*

Jese’Rai bulled around the corner, appearing through the sheet of rain like some kind of avenging spirit from the waves. She held up the package and shook it, probably too hard given its probable contents. The goblins, who had been clustered around the money pouch sprang apart and reached for their various weaponry.

‘Wha’ da fuck is dis?’ the warrior thundered, dangling the package with a vengeful look on her face.

‘What are you talking about woman, we’ve concluded our business, time for you to piss of says I,’ the goblin replied, his bruisers spreading apart.

‘Dis nail is loose... Ju tink ju can empty our box and we wouldn’t know it? Ju tink all trolls are big an’ slow huh?’ Jese’Rai pointed to one of the nails which they had pried slightly from the wood like it was the prick of a cheating husband. Serat had to admit, perched on the roof behind them all, that she was doing a mighty fine job of acting the deceived customer.

The group fell to squabbling, Jese’Rai demanding her money back and the goblin demanding they open up the package and prove that he had not tampered with it, which gave Serat just the distraction he needed. Rubbing his hands together, trying to dry them off even some small amount he began to crawl down the wall behind the goblins.

Yes, it was slick and slippery, but Serat had been climbing longer than he had been running and he moved slowly and surely, each movement as careful as a sloth’s. Strong fingers wrapped around pipes or slipped around bricks, and he descended the wall like a great pale spider, long limbs stretching him out.

He gathered himself on the ground, the noise of the rain masking his movements and with aching slowness, reached his hand behind his back to unsheathe his black glass dagger. Jese’Rai was looking everywhere but at him, not giving any of the goblins an excuse to follow her gaze and spot him before everything was in place. He was sure that they would hear him though, the pounding of his heart, the hollow gust of his breathing. He had killed before, all manner of men and beasts, but this goblin had simply walked into something he shouldn’t have. Was it different? Samedi would have to sort it out, because Serat couldn’t afford to think about it now.

Uncoiling like a striking cobra, Serat wrapped both arms around the flamboyantly dressed goblin, pulling him back against his chest and yanking his knife across his throat. He thought the keen blade would go through neatly, and gaped when it caught on the goblin’s spine. He had to yank hard to dislodge and a great wash of arterial blood gushed from the green neck.

Jese’Rai was the only one not shocked by the act. Both the bruisers spun around as they heard their boss gurgle his last and as they did, she was already reaching for her weapons while they fumbled to realise what was going on. The blade of her sword chopped deep into the back of one of the bruiser’s skulls, felling him with a confused look on his face, while her other hand sought to stab the other in the base of his neck.

At the last moment he twisted though and the dagger stabbed deep into the meat of his shoulder. He would have screamed then, had Serat not leapt at him, hands empty and clamped his hands over the goblin’s skull, slamming his jaw closed, and cutting of any such yell. The two creatures struggled, the goblin punishing Serat with hard punches to his stomach, while the troll hung onto his head desperately, knowing that to be caught by the goblin authorities would likely mean their execution.

The blows quickly got weaker though, and Serat cracked open his eyes. Jese’Rai stood above him, her hand red to the wrist and the goblin’s back a map of puncture wounds. With old-man slowness, Serat unwrapped himself from the body and cradled his aching ribs.

Jese’Rai on the other hand, moved with quiet professionalism, quickly dragging the bodies to the back of the alley and throwing some of the detritus of them. It wouldn’t disguise them long, but in the rain and with the confusion on the explosion, it might do enough. While Serat tried to wash some of the blood off in the puddles of rainwater, she gathered up the package and money pouch.

‘Time to leave Bilgewater behind then?’ he asked her, knowing completely that she was far more suited to this sort of work than he ever might be.

She nodded, already having tossed away her blood drenched jerkin, leaving her in a loose undershirt that clung wetly to her battle-hardened body and breasts.

‘Time to go, Serat,’ She said and gave him a warm smile, with both sides of her mouth. ‘And hey, who says you can’t leave the goblins with your pockets full?’

She jingled the money pouch.

*

Some weeks later, drinking in the Wyvern's Tail, Serat heard the news.

Two supply air ships, being loaded to head to Gromgol and the effort against the Gurubashi, had been scuttled while resting in their cradles. Most of the supplies had been ruined and one unlucky dockworker who had been dozing somewhere he shouldn’t had been killed in the explosions.

Like most of the others in the tavern, Serat scowled at the news and offered his theories on who might have been responsible amidst the cries for vengeance.

Alliance spies hiding amongst the blood elves maybe? Weren’t they goblin devices? Could those short-arse mercenaries really be trusted?

The raise of a cup can hide all sorts of smiles it seemed.

 

 


	3. The Corpse and the Sorceress

Kotemu slapped his cards down on the table and swore exuberantly. At any other time, from any other mouth, Serat might have raised his hackles at such an outburst, dropped into a fighting stance – but coming from the gap-toothed grin of the troll next to him, the words lost all their bite. Across the table from them, the two elves broke into a good-natured laughter, lightly jeering the troll as the nearest spread his arms around the coins scattered on the table and pulled them back to his corner. Serat tried to smile with them, weakly pulling back his lips into something he was sure looked more like a grimace than a grin. He was not good at this – this _acting_. It was like he had swallowed a bucket of bait, the way his insides were squirming. Even the drink he choked down did not seem to help, just made the churning worse. At every moment he imagined one of the two elves to call him on his nervousness, to see through his gauze-thin deception and unsheathe the swords that so casually leaned against their chairs.

But, amazingly, neither did. In fact one leaned over and patted his shoulder, smiled and made jokes with him – like he was one of them, like he wasn’t plotting betrayal. As he looked at his cards he supposed that the glint of easy money made everything worth laughing about. And that was something Serat did not have to act. It was the first time he had played the particular card game and it was only Kotemu’s hasty tutorial a few hours before that gave him any sort of clue as to what the various pictures signified. Kotemu, on the other hand, was having to work very hard. He was a truly gifted card player and finding different ways to lose hands while also appearing happy to give his money to the elves was taxing his considerable skill. Still, as Serat looked at his enormous grin and listened to his ribald jokes, the young shadow hunter could not help but wonder how easy the older troll made it all look.

Serat turned his hand over and flung his gambit into the pot. He needed no tricks to fold – even playing to win the elves were far too experienced and not nearly drunk enough to give him any openings. Anaxophren and Sibelus were both military men and it had taken all of Kotemu’s considerable charm to worm the two trolls into their company. Both having seen action, the elves were automatically a bit wary around trolls, having lost friends to the ever present, ever dangerous Amani. Stationed in Tranquillien, one of the key posts regarding the defence of the Ghostlands from both Zul’Aman and the Scourge remnant, Anaxophren and Sibelus were part of the company protecting the town. They were also of great interest to Serat and his partner.

They had come to Tranquillien posing as scalphunters – part of the great unnamed crusade of adventurers and opportunistic soldiers-of-fortune who had journeyed north when the Amani threat had emerged in all its tusked rage, all hoping to claim a clipping of the coin that was being offered for forest troll heads. Kotemu, who was himself a forest troll, had wanted to bring a string of scalps with them to the town, to establish their credentials in undeniable style. He had some old turgid grudge to settle with the Amani and despite his new allegiances – despite his very mission in the Ghostlands – he still had the urge to fulfil its bloody path. Serat had forbidden it, threatened to curse Kotemu every which way in the name of any loa that would listen, until the matter had been settled. Eventually they had slunk away from the Amani’s camp and culled the Scourge until their bags bulged with trophies.

It was strange, thought Serat, how taking away the label of ‘enemy’ changed things. Amani were once his enemy, a rival tribe, worshippers of weak gods and fat armed trolls with dull minds and haggish women, and so it would be nothing to kill a dozen of them to make a point. No, kill them all if it would elevate him in the eyes of the Darkspear – their lives only mattered as notches on the spear. But now? Now that they were brothers? It seemed obscene to allow that one should die to make Serat’s job any easier. He knew that it was his problem, his failing. He walked in the world of spirits and saw the idealised apprehension of his dreams – not the fleshy reality. He knew in his mind that people would have to bleed for the dream – by his own hand he had murdered even – but it was hard to reconcile that with what lurked in his heart of hearts.

By what would the gods judge him when he came before them? His mind or his heart? Would they hold his doubts against him, or only what he achieved in the world? He stared at his cards, the elven royal figures dancing before his eyes, he was aware it was his turn to play but he had no idea what he should do. Anaxophren was giving him a long look so Serat smiled and patted his bald crown.

‘Too much wine ah tink,’ he said and blinked rapidly, though he felt snake sober. He turned his cards face down and waved for Kotemu to play on.

His smile disappeared as soon their attention slid off him.

The troll gods had never been afraid of a little blood. He better than anyone knew that, knew what they demanded for their blessing and their boons.

Blood and sacrifice.

*

It was late in the night and despite Kotemu’s protestations, the elves gathered up the coin they had won, made their excuses and staggered back to their barracks, celebrating trollish ineptitude. They left behind the mess their play had made of the winehouse’s common room. As soon as the curtain fell back across the doorway, Kotemu was up, moving like he had not just matched the elves drink for drink – even sharing the same trollish regeneration and fortitude, Serat was impressed by Kotemu’s presence, obviously his forest troll bulk had additional advantages. The troll used one thick green finger to twitch aside the curtain.

‘Alright, they’re good and gone,’ Kotemu said and Serat nodded, blinking away his own alcohol induced disorientation and sliding around the table. Nothing had been touched since the elves had left and once again Serat sent a silent thanks to the loas that Tranquillien was such a ghost town in the evenings. With the comforts of Silvermoon City only a short dragonhawk flight away, even the most battle-hardened of veterans found they would rather endure the undulating ride rather than face the bleak, mourning quiet of a night in the Ghostlands. Still, they had been forced to empty their coin pouches even further to encourage the winemaster to turn in early and leave them free rein of the common room – it could have ruined everything if he had come down and cleaned up.

‘Here we go,’ Kotemu said, holding up a long strand of hair between thumb and finger. ‘Anaxophren, if I got any eyes in me head.’

Serat nodded, poring over Sibelus’s chair, that soldier had kept his hair shorter than his compatriot’s, but all elves seemed to moult worse than cats in summer, so Serat was sure he would find something if he kept his eyes open. Fortunately, while Anaxophren had the silver gold hair that gleamed like a precious metal, Sibelus’s was raven black with the kind of gloss that no other race seemed able to emulate, so there was little chance of confusing the harvests.

In the end, he only found two strands of the black lengths and Serat folded them along with what Kotemu found from Anaxophren’s head into a piece of parchment, tucking it carefully against his chest. Straightening up, he looked at Kotemu, who pointed at one of the crystal goblets, a finger of wine at its bottom.

‘That was Sibelus’s cup, right?’ Serat couldn’t honestly remember, the goblet had been left far too close to the centre of the table for him to associate it with one of the chairs, but he nodded anyway.

‘Can you do anything with it?’

The shadow hunter shrugged and picked up the glass, sniffing it carefully. If it was Sibelus’s goblet then some of his spit would have washed back into the wine and that would make for a better connection and Serat would take any help that he could. It wasn’t blood, but asking the elves for a finger would have probably been a gambit too far.

‘That’ll do?’ Kotemu asked, surveying the scene, keen eyes looking for anything else that might aid Serat’s part of the plan.

‘That’ll do,’ Serat confirmed, pouring the dredges of wine into a small vial. ‘They told us everything we know, right?’

It was Kotemu’s turn to nod. ‘Aye. Those two will be taking the watch tomorrow night, second stand, so no one else should be up. Auriferous and the corpse come back that morning so it’s our best chance.’

Serat scratched his neck. ‘Only one stand, that doesn’t give us much time?’

‘Aye so you best be prepared. Everything got to work right quick.’

Serat grunted and gave the room one last look over.

‘Tomorrow then?’ he asked.

‘Tomorrow.’

*

Serat spent the next day preparing.

He put the mission out of his mind and treated it like any other ritual. Otherwise he found that the clarity of mind that he needed escaped him and his thoughts tumbled down reckless pathways. So he did the familiar things – he unwrapped his totems, bringing out his loas and making temples of the foreign soil. He asked for their blessing and a measure of their surety, pouring, hanging and smearing his meagre offerings. He shaped and prepared the tools he would need for the magic later, this time building from modelling wax to best simulate the flesh of elves.

Lastly, just as the sun dipped below the tree line, and the shroud of night was pulled over the Ghostlands, he reapplied the white skull face of his patron loa.

It seemed no time at all before he was squatted in the brush, hidden but with a clear line of sight at the two crimson-clad elves guarding a very particular building in Tranquillien.

Sibelus and Anaxophren had just relieved their comrades and were settling into that particular stance of guards everywhere who knew that they were going to have to stand still for a great deal of time. They did not look to be especially vigilant, but then they knew there were guards posted all around Tranquilien. Significantly though, those guards looked outwards for the threat.

Serat took a quiet breath and touched the two poppets that he had propped before him, one trailing the golden mane of Anaxophren , the other dusted with black hairs and smelling of sweet elvish wine. Between them was another vial, this one filled with the strongest, most potently throat-burning whiskey that Kotemu’s money could buy in Booty Bay – which meant that it was foul indeed and probably used in cleaning the hulls of galleys.

Kotemu himself was nowhere to be seen, having silently slunk into some deeper shadow after Serat had picked his spot.

It was time.

Serat stared unblinking at the two elves and quested out with his senses, letting the smoke of the spirit world slowly slide into his sight. There is was, the most tenuous of connections between the wax poppets and the guardsmen, like a thread of spider web twinkling in the morning dew. Gently, like blowing on the weakest ember, he poured a touch of his power into the link, strengthening it, turning the poppets into more than just crude representations of the two elves and into a channel through which he could act.

Holding that connection, he picked up the vial of whiskey and without smelling it, he knocked it back. Holding the vile concoction in his mouth. He retched but mastered himself. His eyes watered as the alcohol burned his tongue and the fumes clogged his sinuses and throat. This was not alcohol, this was poison.

Blinking away the tears, Serat began marshalling his strength, preparing the hex he would unleash on the elves. Sitting cross-legged, his hands on his knees, fingers twitching, he let it build, gathering and squashing it down so none leaked free. He pictured it like the thunderhead of one of the Stormfather’s black clouds, rolling and churning, growing larger and more potent with each passing second. He shaped and refined it, allowing the dizzying stench of the whiskey to enter the spell.

When he struck it would have to be overwhelming and instantaneous. The elves should be unaware and vulnerable, their minds open to such an attack, the sudden intoxication taking them with the force of an anvil dropping on their heads. They would awake hours later tasting the filth on their tongue, feeling the nauseating roil of their stomachs, the pounding in their head and most of all without any clear recollection of what happened. They would not even know they had been attacked.

And that was key.

His limbs trembled and Serat could not hold it in anymore. He swallowed down the whiskey and hunching his shoulders he pushed the storm that raged within his outwards, breathing his intoxicating breath over the two wax poppets.

The link between the men and their representations channelled and intensified and as soon as they took a breath it hit them. Sibelus instantly crumpled, falling face down, his arse in the air. Anaxophren, however, just staggered, his brow furrowed in confusion, his shield and glaive dropping to the ground.

_What the fuck?_

Serat leaned forward. How was it possible? Some mere soldier resisting his hex? He hissed dangerously through his teeth. Then he saw it – like a vortex of negation hanging from Anaxophren’s neck. Some kind of charm against harmful magic – it was doing enough to block the full effects of Serat’s curse. How had he missed that at the card game? Was he that blind? Gods it could ruin anything!

Serat gritted his teeth.

_No_

The storm was still within him. He had not missed it. Anaxophren had not been wearing it the other night. But he would not let it stop him. The elf had probably picked it up at some half-penny copper stall as a token gesture – Serat had bled in ritual scarring at the feet of the hungry loas, his power could rip the dreams from a man’s skull. He would crash over this charm like the breakers of the sea, he would tear this pathetic hedge-witch’s charm apart like so much prey at the claws of a tiger. He pared his power down, making a spear of the storm, a bolt of lightning to fly into Anaxophren’s mind. Cold elvish magic had no life against the fever of the jungle, the-

From the shadows behind the stumbling elf came a large green fist, a dull smack as it impacted against golden hairs. Without the conscious mind, the charm collapsed and Serat’s curse flew into Anaxophren unimpeded and Kotemu stepped over the prone body.

Serat stared open mouthed. They would have to hope that Anaxophren put his throbbing head down to his hangover. He gathered up his things and sprinted over to join his partner, who was already kneeling by the door, his tools laid out at his side on black velvet.

While Kotemu worked on picking the lock, his fingers moving incredibly deftly despite their thickness, Serat opened a bottle of elvish liqueur and poured a measure of the amber liquid into each of the elves’ mouths. The rest he splattered onto their clothing. The bottle he placed at Sibelus’s feet. Come their discovery, the two of them would stink of the drink that must have knocked them out.

A lot of trouble to go to, but their mission required that their theft not be discovered.

There was a quiet click and the door opened smoothly. Kotemu flashed a yellow grin and let the door swing open. They both knew their parts in this, Serat had been forced to endure Kotemu lecturing him endlessly about the plan in his dull monotonous voice.

He peered around the door, Kotemu looking over his shoulder. His gaze started in one corner and ignoring all the items that littered the room, tracked carefully to the opposite corner. Wordlessly, he pointed at a carpet that sat just inside the door. Its threads had been woven with a ward. Serat couldn’t parse out its precise magicks, he only knew it was to be avoided. Kotemu gave him a hard look and Serat nodded insistently. It was the part they had most worried about, the arcane defences that might have been put in place, for undoing them would be as bad as tripping them – Serat and Kotemu had to make it as if they had never been.

Silently, the bigger troll slipped past him, lightly skipping over the carpet and dropping quietly on the other side, moving like a shadow for all his size. Serat wanted to watch him work but he had to keep watch and he carefully closed the door behind him.

Inside, the chambers where the High Executor Mavren and the blood elf Dame Auriferous coordinated the joint assault on the Amani trolls, Serat knew Kotemu was rifling through orders and plans, looking for the papers that would make the difference.

He glanced at the moon, attempting to figure out how long they had been and how much time Kotemu needed to transcribe his findings.

That had been that part that had surprised Serat. He thought it was just a matter of stealing the sin’dorei and forsaken plans, to know of their positions and orders – Kotemu had bluntly explained how foolish that was. The Executor and Dame would simply adjust their strategies once they discovered the theft and all the efforts would have been for naught. No, they could not know that someone had even _attempted_ to steal from them.

So, on the one night where both forsaken and elf were called back to Silvermoon City for consultation, when two guards with a history for binge drinking were on duty, Kotemu had to painstakingly copy what he found, summarise and scrawl, all in his neat, blocky script.

Minutes passed with callous slowness. Serat expected someone to wander by with each noise he heard. Just one of the civilian craftsmen, out for a night’s wander, spotting the two slumped guardsmen and raising the alarm.

But miraculously, no one came and he jumped out of his skin when the hollow knock sounded from the door. He gave the two knocks of all-clear and Kotemu stepped out, sliding sheets of parchment into his jacket. Serat quelled the urge to ask him about what had found, there would be time for that later – for now, Kotemu had to lock-up and then they needed to disappear.

*

They didn’t leave town immediately, after all, they had done nothing wrong. Kotemu wanted to watch for any reaction from the guard in the morning, make sure they had covered all their tracks and Serat indulged him despite his desire to be away. He had no desire to find out what punishment they had unsheathed on Anaxophren and Sibelus. Rather, as soon as Kotemu was happy, they parted ways with little ceremony, only the nod of a job well done.

Serat knew he would have little conception of what their mission had achieved, the vagaries of battle and strategy were just too many to be tipped by their small thing, but as he flew back into Orgrimmar, he felt elation in his breast that had nothing to do with the rush of wind past his ears.

He was doing something! With each mission he did, he brought trolls one step closer to the Empire.

And that made him something more.

 

 


	4. Sharks in Still Waters

Serat hunkered down in Orgrimmar.

He got to know the secrets of the city. He crawled through its veins, manoeuvred himself amongst its muscular guards and scurrying peons. He skulked in his free time, turning corners because he had never turned down them before, peering in windows or drinking in the deepest of dives. He found the caverns where warlocks traded insubstantial valuables in exchange for power and held back his spit with a self-control that was strengthening with each passing day, each mission he completed. It was not that he had anything in particular against warlocks – his patron god’s sphere of influence ended at the shores of death – it was just that he didn’t want any of it to get on him. One day he clambered up the red walls of the cliffs that surrounded the city, settled onto his haunches to watch it, study its ebbs and flows. He told himself that he was measuring it up like a hunter might observe the antics of a tiger, but in truth he sat there simply to watch. The airships floated in above him and people moved endlessly below him. When he closed his eyes, he imagined he could hear, beneath all the chatter and clank of construction, the slow boom of the city’s heart beating.

Most of all though, he waited. The missions came to him by a myriad of means. Once a monkey had dropped a note into his lap and then disappeared before he had realised what was going on. On one terrifying occasion he had been visited in his dream by a masked and robed figure, whose orders had been garbled by a vision of the skull-faced Baron hovering on the intruder's shoulder. That they could invade Serat’s dreams so readily, pierce through all his defences, scared the young shadowhunter. It meant that someone, somewhere had made a little doll of Serat with a very strong link.

Usually though, he checked along the wall of the Valley of Honour. It was his assigned drop point and his handlers would scratch code into the rusty red stone, pictograms that would mean nothing to the casual observer. They would lead him to a meeting or a stash of orders and Serat would carry them out. He knew there was something bigger going on around him, the tasks that he was assigned all pointed towards that conclusion. He had been told to trail a venerable old troll, to note down his exact movements over the course of a week. There had been no telling of who the troll was, nor where his loyalties lay, but Serat held his curiosity in check, cutting free a section of shadow with his panther-bone knife and draping it over his shoulders like a cloak. The job had been banal and so had his findings, but he passed them along regardless.

Another time he had been ordered by a skittish jungle troll to send specifically shaped nightmares into the sleeping minds of three orcish commanders. That had wrecked Serat for almost a week after. First had been the preparations, acquiring the reagents that he would need to penetrate the minds of the orcs. None were easy, all had come with a price. Then the links themselves: Serat had absorbed a beating from one of the commanders just to snatch a handful of bristly copper hair and paid a whore to sleep with another. The third had spat in his face with little enough provocation. The content of the dream he would shape himself, but still he needed to harvest the emotions that would lend the vision its power. The terror was easy enough, a black cockerel cut by his knife would know bowel-squeezing terror. The trust that would make the orcs receptive to the dream’s message, that had been harder. But one day while pondering the question, he had seen a wolf trailing at the heel of a tauren and he had his answer.

The power he rationed out over the days of his preparations, allowing himself only the merest of charms, bottling up the rest in little loa batteries, bloated godlings that wallowed in their cages, thinking themselves mighty and unaware of their victimhood. In the dreams though... that was where Serat  had to exercise control, wrap jungle vines around his ego, rein in the powers that he commanded. To reach out and shape the dreamstuff according to whim, it was heady, tempting work and lesser hexers had lost themselves in the amorphous hinterlands of the id – set up kingdoms in another man’s mind. One man mad, another body rotting away, empty. Serat had to split his thoughts three ways , exhausted all of his reserves and spent the next week talking to himself and staggering about hollow-cheeked.

He was not told the reason for the vision as much as he hungered to know. He felt that somewhere trolls were saying his name and nodding, that wings were unfurling and he was pulled deeper.

A plan was mentioned on his next mission. He was reunited with Jese’Rai and they smiled when they saw one another again, and while she had little choice given her wound, his was genuine. She could not speak much of what she had been doing and neither could he, but they implied and inferred and danced over euphemisms. They took a fishing boat and sailed into neutral waters where humans waited for them with unmarked crates and Serat offered to curse the boat to the Stormfather’s keeping, but Jese’Rai said nay. They paid them in religious relics that Serat had unearthed in Atal’Hakker. They stank and he was glad to be rid of them. In the cabin that was hot and stifling Jese’Rai said words that let Serat know that the plan was not a plot but a person and the excitement that set him to shivering was not merely from her tongue curling along his ear.

A target! The Customer, Our Man, Old Topper. Serat was pulled into the outer ring of the plotting, hearing meetings where he was allowed to listen to terms without knowing their meaning – a kind of permission that kept him at a safe distance. He knew he was being included in the conspiracy, that he had shown himself to be useful and loyal. The other missions dried up but he didn’t feel at a loose end or cast aside – he felt like an arrow, slowly being drawn back, nocked against a cheek, his target slowly coming into view. When he drank with the few friends he had in Orgrimmar, he had shed the burden of the Troll Empire that he had carried about lately, was light of tongue and humour. He got drunk, bought drinks that he had never tasted before: Mulgore Firewater, Arcanist Distilled and others that burned a path down to his stomach and made the room pitch and yaw like the cabin of a ship.

He left them in the midst of a vaguely revolutionary singalong, tottering and teetering like a newborn giraffe, relying on his arm to keep him level. He was aiming for the boarding house where he took his lodging, the cupboard sized room with leaf thin walls through which he heard his neighbour arguing with some old sin. Serat was elated, buoyed along on an energetic drunkenness that caused him to look the passing few troll women with a salacious eye, as if that were charming enough. He forgot entirely of the waters that he swam in, had been a shark for so long that he could not imagine hunters that trailed his spoor.

‘Tha’ ‘im?’ bubbled a voice. Serat was staggering through the twists and turns of the Drag, curiously detached from the physical experience of his body and so the sounds came to him like he was eavesdropping on his own ears through a puddle of soup.

‘White pelt, white hair, white mask. I call that Whiteface. After you then,’ said another. By the time Serat puzzled out that he should be alarmed, darkness was suffocating him.

...

*

A sensation like twin foot-long icicles being hammered up his nose, lightning flashes behind his eyes and a sleet of cold water being sluiced over his face.  The last, Serat opened his eyes to see, because a bucket of water had been flung over his face. And behind the bucket, with a shock of blue hair was a troll. The intoxication had been bleached from his mind by whatever painful cure they had magicked into him, but the shock of awakening meant that Serat instantly scowled at seeing one of his kin. He wanted to spit a curse, but he found his mouth gagged, the straps cutting into his jaw. He gathered himself, breathing hard through his nose, turned his anger into a general rage at his circumstances. It was only sharpened when a second figure stepped into view.

Half her face stapled onto the other, one eye a metal ball, the other glowing a wan yellow, the Forsaken woman stood ramrod straight and appeared to be covered in leather straps from neck to fingertip. She flicked closed a timepiece then came to stand directly in front of Serat, pushing the troll to one side as she scratched one hand over her bald scalp.

‘Serat Whiteface, of no fixed abode. You have not been behaving like a good citizen lately, have you?’ she said, tapping her finger against his noise. He recoiled, throwing his head and huffing loudly. To have such a creature touch him! His wrists strained, tied behind his back, but the knots were the work of professionals – not the convenient idiot goons of a story.

‘Wandering about all over the place, convening with very disreputable characters. One would have to be very forgiving indeed not to get a little bit suspicious, Serat.’ The Forsaken shook her head, party to some great disappointment, and gestured at the troll.

How much did they know? How much _could_ they know? Serat’s thoughts raced as the troll cracked his knuckles. Was it safer to assume that they had worked it all out or that they knew nothing at all and were just fishing at a likely shoal? All that became secondary as a green fist pounded into his cheek, snapping his head to the side. His thoughts dispersed like shattered glass and then pulled back together in a new configuration. Fuck it, they didn’t know nothing and he wasn’t going to add to their ignorance.

The troll was waggling his hand. ‘Dere we go, got yer attention. Now, dun wanna ‘ave to do dat agin, so ju keep yer eyes on me, eh? Dun mind me friend dere.’ He pointed his fingers at Serat’s angry red eyes and then at his own. His voice dropped down the register and he switched into Zandali. ‘Now, let’s be smart about this, Serat. We both know something is going down. All we need from you is a name or two. Don’t even need to say ‘em, could just write ‘em down for me. Now how’s about that then?’ He smiled encouragingly and Serat tried his best to sneer back at him around the gag.

‘I mean, what’s your game here then? Don’t you know how good we trolls got it now? Are you that dense?’ The troll threw his arms up over his head, grimacing. ‘I’ve heard the talk y’know. Putting the trolls back on top – like there’s something good to be found in all them Gurubashi and Amani lot. I mean spirit’s below, Serat! Half a century ago and you and me, we’d be drinking out of skulls of Bloodscalp and toasting their corpses. Darkspear are big men in the Horde, cast long shadows! You wanna throw all that away for some promises from a Zandali?’

Serat pointedly glanced away from the troll’s eyes. He had heard it all before and from better minds than this one. Trolls who were too blind to learn the lessons of the Horde were just as much a joke to him as those who thought the faction weak. He was glad for the gag then, he did not want to trade wits with this troll, this betrayer, this _collaborator_. He used the opportunity to look around. He was stripped down to his loincloth, even the ankh that was normally lashed to his chest had been ripped away. There... all his gear had been stashed on top of a worn table. All his charms and hexes, the vials and weapons, stinking with a great pungent smoke of power but too far away for him to do anything with, not all bunched into a confusing skein of competing spirits.

The troll yanked on his tusk and slapped Serat hard against the side of his face. ‘Oi, I told you to keep your eyes on me. That’s what annoys me most about your lot, Serat, your boys. You’re so fucking stupid.’ The troll spat the curse and behind the jovial facade, Serat could see that he really did have a seething anger for the Imperials. ‘You really think that killing Garrosh is gonna help you? Argh! You do, don’t you? It’s just gonna make us trolls look like fools, ruin any trust we had we the orcs. You think it’s easy, keeping all this held together when we got brethren talking about an Empire? Vol’jin is clutching at straws, man. Some orcs are just looking for an excuse, any excuse to stab us in the back. If you give a solitary fuck for troll-kind, you’ll talk to me, Serat.’

The hopeful look on the troll’s craggy settled quickly into something steely and unforgiving. ‘You really should talk to me, Serat. Otherwise you’ll be talking to her.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to where the abomination walked, once more looking at her timepiece. ‘And her friends don’t play so nice, and they definitely ain’t the kind to stop when you think you’ve had enough.’  

'So let's keep this real simple,' the troll said, lifting his fingers into view and splaying them. 'Who. When. Where. How.' With that, he hooked his fingers over the gag, and dislodged it from Serat's mouth. Serat coughed, spittle drooling out over his chin and shook his head his head desperately.

'No no no no, I don't know _anything_!' He pleaded, made his voice as wheedling as pathetic as he could. He thought of all the spineless people he had met in Orgrimmar, the ingratiating goblins or the unimaginative and servile grunts, tried to summon them to fill his skin. 'I sorry, so sorry, don't do thissss. I listened to some folk talkin' yes yes. Big words about Empire and I'm _sorry_.' He dropped truths to better lie. 'On top of the rock spires, I can show you but I don't know _anything_ about no a-a-assassination, please!'

He did not like acting, but reluctantly he had watched his fellows - learned that the key was to submerge the self, to truly make oneself believe the words. Make what one said the measure of being, rather than the other way around. He physically strained himself, poured himself into the belief that he was a silly child caught up in machinations that he did not understand.

It was a foolish endeavour really. All Serat had heard of the people who made up the shadow guardians of Orgrimmar and the Horde told him that they were not the sort to listen to discussion. They had long since decided that he knew something  and anything that flew in the face of that was thus deemed a fabrication. Already the troll across from him was shaking his head with a grave sadness.

He switched back to orcish and spoke to the Forsaken. ''Ow long til Geryn gets 'ere, den?'

'Ten minutes,' she replied. Somehow her voice had survived death intact, melodious and beguiling.

The troll interrogator turned back to Serat with a vicious grin. 'You won't like Geryn. He's an elf, lost a lot of friends to the Amani, you see. He's gonna plunder your brain like a coconut, ain't nothing you can hide in there. But I like you, Serat, think you're pretty cute, so I'm gonna give you that ten minutes to talk to me.' The blue-haired troll stretched his fingers out, bouncing his palms together and then cracking his knuckles. 'Course, think you might need some encouraging.'

Serat's mouth went dry and the pit of his stomach dropped out. He was brave, he knew that from experience. He had faced monsters and magic, had his bowels damn near strung out of him by a demon dog. But always he had been able to fight back. He squirmed in the chair, threw his shoulders into it, trying to pull himself free, rock the chair over. Anything to not simply be a victim of his fate. It was no good. The seat was bolted to the floor and the ropes were as thick as a finger and expertly tied.

The troll was a professional. He did not beat from any sick fascination with pain, but a knowledge that it was an effective tool. The first punch slammed into Serat's stomach, knocking the wind out of him and leaving him terribly exposed to the next, smashing into his face, to shock and disorientate. Coppery tasting blood welled in Serat's mouth and he yelled in pain. There was no point to bravery and silence - no audience to impress and it _hurt_. His jaw creaked with pain, like it had been shattered, hairline fractures of pain, sharp tendrils that diffused into an all encompassing ache. He gabbled, spitting words heavy with saliva.

'Ogoun! Ogoooun. Don't hit me! It was Ogoun-' Serat arched involuntarily as a green fist smacked heavily against his side. His attacker was no longer interested in talking. Who, when, where, how. Those were the only things he wanted to hear. Serat slumped in the chair, dropping his chin to his chest only for it to be snapped back with a brutal uppercut.

Through the barrage of blows, a thought began to emerge. It wasn't easy, every time it looked like it would surface and the I that was Serat tried to get a grip on it, another punch would send it spinning away. But eventually he grasped it:

_There was no way this was going to end well_

It was more shocking than the blast of cold water from earlier, or the realization his hands were trapped. It jarred him from the narrative he had made for his own life - the thought that all hardships had an answer, a way out that if he was just smart enough or strong enough or quick enough, he could exploit. But here he was, being used as a punching bag by a troll that would happily let an elvish sorcerer reach into his mind and rip out all his secrets. If he lived then he was ruined, brain muddled and pored through like the entrails of a chicken. If, by some miracle chain of events, he escaped, then all their suspicions would be confirmed and he would spend the rest of his days haunted and hunted.

It was strange - the thought that death would be the best he could hope for. He had expected that when the time came for him to face death, he would face it peacefully, at one with his circumstances and his god. But he couldn't... Serat was _angry_! This wasn't how it was meant to be! He wasn't supposed to be tied up like a hog for feast day dinner! He wasn't meant to die for this!

The troll interrogator was taking in great lungfuls of air, panting and massaging his knuckles. He was treating Serat to an appraising look, measuring up a side of meat. Serat himself was hunched over, strings of pink drool dripping down to his stomach. He had lost teeth, he could sense the absences even without moving his tongue, which felt swollen and fat in his mouth. He needed to act, and soon.

He lifted his head, watched the blue fist scream towards him. The situation was far from ideal and his plan was laced with dreadful dangers. But there was little to lose and so much to gain. He shut his eyes and just before the fist impacted against his face.... he disappeared.

It was worse than plunging into an icy stream. Phasing his physical body into the spirit world was immensely dangerous - the very landscape was inimical to material things. He tumbled back through the chair, skin getting cut on the angles and weird geometries of the spirit world. He was forced to hold his breath, for there was nothing to breathe and he had no guiding loa to shield him from the worst of the effects. As it met the "air" his blood fizzed and effervesced to a red smoke and then to nothing. There was no time to consider and reflect, just the barest seconds to get his bearings. The room was washed out and blurred, like he was looking at through the memory of a dream, and the floor beneath him felt spongy, as stable as a fleeting glance of a familiar face. Around him, the two interrogators were burning eyed demons, their physical  forms shadowy while the force that animated them bright and potent. They raged, swarming silently over the chair which Serat had fallen through.

He dragged himself forward, and when he moved a ghost of his body preceded him - his soul, pulling his body behind it. It was the worst kind of torture, being yoked to the heavy meat and bone, the threads that bound his anima to his stuff yanked taut, to the point of tearing. He ground his teeth together, lungs bursting as he waded towards the table - in the eyes of the spirit his gear was an orgy of colourful creatures and auras. His two murder spirits Hopi and Hala watched him with a lizard's patience, twin raptors perhaps, though nothing in the astral plane could be so easily categorised. Embers danced along the glossy black blade of his obsidian knife, and made rude gestures at the zephyrs that corkscrewed lazily around the other. They would hardly be the only entities swimming the waters though, and those Serat had not tamed. They would smell his presence, find him to be a delicious morsel.

He couldn't hold it. A yard from the table he snapped back into the material world, stumbling as gravity and the other laws angrily reasserted themselves with a vengeance. Fortunately the two interrogators were facing the other way and Serat had a second to steady himself before they spotted him. He lunged, his long arms reaching out, his eye not betraying him as he swept two items into his grip just as the troll caught him around the waist. The troll was far stronger than Serat and trained in grappling, but Serat had the advantage of not needing to fight against his attacker.

They jackknifed on the floor, their legs flailing about. The troll had caught Serat's wrist and was edging the black blade of the knife closer and closer towards the shadow hunter's face. Serat strained, tendons standing taut up from his pale skin, his red eyes wide.

_Just a little further..._

His leg lashed out, snapping against the leg of the table, the brittle, aged wood cracking and the collapsing under the weight above it. Charms and fetishes, trophies and armour clattered down onto the floor, bouncing off the troll's broad back. His attacker grunted and heaved and Serat felt the kiss of the keen blade on his neck. A flush of triumph flooded through Serat's body and he grinned, showing off bloody teeth.

Suddenly, without a flicker of warning in his eyes, he relaxed his arm and before the troll could stop himself, he was pushing the dagger into Serat's throat. He yelped and tried to pull away, but Serat forced himself up, curling and yanking his neck across the knife in a whipping motion. Arterial blood sprayed out and cold fire burned in his body. Serat slumped back, muscles heavy as stone, his mouth gaping open and closed like a beached fish. The troll had clamped his hand over the jagged wound but it was too late, rich red bubbling out from between his fingers, spewed out by the pumps of Serat's yammering heart.

Only one way out.

Darkness enveloped him, shadowy tendrils closing over the world, a soothing balm from the pain in his body. The tension that had held him rigid for so long, the worldly burdens evaporated and his fingers relaxed, opening like the petals of a flower.  The other item he had swept up along with his knife tumbled from his grip, joining the others scattered on the floor.

_Maybe..._

A golden ankh, flickering strangely in the shadows.

 

 


	5. What the Bat Told the Troll

Shadows stretched out their fingertips as night dawned on Orgrimmar. From underneath crags and overhangs, from behind rocks and the cracks of doors the shades reached into the dying light of day, grasping for space, like the scrabbling lunges of a drowning man, desperate to grip onto that slippery piece of flotsam. In a few hours they would be subsumed into true darkness, but for these brief moments of transition they ruled supreme. A colony of the shadows claimed the landfill that abutted the goblin slums, a stinking barrow that oozed effluence and shimmered with an almost tangible aura of filth. One amongst their number moved with cat-like caution, picking its way from corner to corner. Like ink-spilled across vellum it streaked through burning shafts of sunlight to loiter in dank hollows. With each passing second it grew, gathering the ethereal gloom-stuff to itself , its edges becoming more defined, more prominent. What might have been horns or long ears perked up from its head, and arms or legs stretched from its silhouette.

It ran across a two dimensional landscape, folding around corners and unfurling over ridges. It slipped into the elongated shadows of the goblin children that worked the heap, allowed them to move it towards its destination. Crossed streams of vile yellow liquid and pools of green that bubbled and churned, stepped over the half-emptied out carcasses of boars and scorpions until at last, in a wet, swampy forgotten ditch, it found the body it was drawn to.

Naked, fish-belly white, mottled with patches of purple, the troll was face down in the stagnant water, one arm bent awkwardly over the narrow back. The shadow flowed towards the feet of the body and lay itself down until it was touching the rough soles of the troll. There was the sizzle of burning flesh and the shadow yawed suddenly, losing its cohesion and swinging to the side, once more at the mercy of natural laws as the magic passed through it into the body. Shudders rippled through white skin and bruises shrank. Bones popped and cracked as they jarred back into place and new teeth pushed up from swollen gums. For a while blood pumped rich and red into the festering water until flesh knitted back together crudely - a rough, blind healing. The body convulsed and bubbles broke the surface, at first one by one and then a whole shoal of them. Arms flailed at the water and legs kicked and the troll lunged from the water, gasping and retching. A foul stream of bile and dank water and stomach acids choked up from his mouth and he collapsed back into the pool, a scream ripping its way from his throat. He wrapped his long arms around his body, shuddering and twitching as dead nerves came back to life and feeling returned to his limbs. He lay there, curled up like a child, weeping.

Serat Whiteface, reborn.

*

Serat ran his thumb over the mark on his neck thoughtfully. The white ridge of skin had the look and feel of melted wax, not a true scar at all, more a small area of confusion, like a dab of paint hurriedly covering up a mistake. Maybe if he hadn't been forced to wait so long, hiding in the spirit world while the fiends moved his body, fearful of every whisper of movement  - maybe then the resurrection would have returned his body to the state he had preserved it in. Instead he had awoken with only a jagged reflection, covered in bruises and carrying the worst of his wounds. Added to that, his extremities had remained numb for days afterward, making him clumsy, like he was wearing gloves far too big for his hands.

He stretched out on his rock, groaning with the release. He was stripped down to the merest of loincloths, toes dangling into the cool clean waters of Feralas. He grinned wide. This was far from the dismal hole in which he had been reborn, so far as to make it seem like a nightmare. And he might not have made it had it not been for the witch.

He was truly indebted to her. She had bundled him to this safe place, a camp far from any prying eyes, healed the worst of his injuries when he had no power of his own, and most generously of all carried a message to his imperial compatriots. She was like one of those good spirits from the stories, always disappearing before the hero woke up. He would have a hard time paying that debt off.

But first, he needed to get well again. If there was one thing to be said for Serat Whiteface, say that he is a good patient. Every morning he woke with the rising of the sun and made his way to the small shrine to Lukou that he had constructed in a shallow pool beside the lake. An hour of quiet obeisance to the totem and he had the day to himself. Though he was tempted, he did not strain his body by drawing on his power - he rested and recuperated, spending entire mornings fishing, or slowly writing out notes to himself in the dust with his finger. Most of the time he lay in the sun, soaking in the warmth like a healing balm. In the evenings, just as the sun sank below the horizon, he would repair to the other shrine he had constructed, this one built in the shadows of the mountains. He genuflected to the totem of the Baron, chanting his devotions and thanking the silent Grandfather for averting his gaze.

As his strength returned, he began to add dancing to his daily routine. The Dawn of the First People, Empire Falls, the Lay of Bel'jin, he moved through them at half speed, stretching out his limbs and stumbling at first as he got the feel for his balance once more. At first, he would collapse at the end of verses, breaths tearing from his mouth and chest heaving, but not before too long he was sheathed in sweat but stronger, moving from dance to dance, thumping the beats of the drums in his head.

On the morning of his fourteenth day of recovery, Serat awoke to find the world filled with meaning. As he left the tent he slept in, the way the hide flapped in the wind sounded like the signal drums trolls would use to communicate with each other across distances. He strained his ears, but he could not quite fathom out the message - only the sense that it was calling his name. Later he was certain that the clouds were being blown into the clumsy forms of glyphs, words written across the sky leagues wide. But the order was jumbled and any meaning was lost by the wisps of errant cloud matter that tangled with every gust of wind.

It was only when he heard a hissing voice whistling through the grasses that Serat nodded to himself. He found a clear position and sat cross-legged, closing his eyes and slowing his breathing right down. It was something he had done a thousand times, but all of a sudden he was struck by a heart-pounding anxiety and his hands balled up into fists. Flashes of fists slamming into his chest jolted him, and the memory of falling bodily into the spirit world cut short his breath. He blinked quickly, trying to marshal his rebellious fears.

_Have a care Serat. You're not going all in this time... just opening your eyes to it..._

Slowly he calmed. He was no good to anyone if he couldn't access his powers, just a mediocre hunter with some wise-sounding non sequiturs. He needed to be able to do this.

He opened his third eye and the landscape around him was transformed. And he was not alone. A troll child was leaping around the plateau, arms held out wide like wings, giggling in a high pitched voice.

'Spirit,' Serat said, his voice strong with command. The troll stopped dead, smiled, and cart wheeled over to him, moving more like a tumbleweed than a body. Standing still, the spirit lost cohesion, looked as if it was behind a haze and then almost invisible, a shimmering outline of hanging dust. A spirit of the air then, of motion and playfulness - like the wind, only visible when it moved things.

'You have a message for me then?' asked Serat, gesturing it closer.

The spirit nodded and edged closer, cupping its hands around its mouth and leaning into Serat's ear. It opened its mouth and a voice emerged, hollow and tinny, carried on the wind for who knows how long.

_We received your message. Good tidings. Meet? Return zephyr when and where._

Serat took a deep breath. This was what he had been waiting for. It was strange, staying in the healing lodge had been like he was separated from the real world. The only other person he had spoken too was Mizah, and even then he could imagine that the problems that affected Azeroth were of some faraway place - the tranquillity of the retreat was so absolute. But he could not live his whole life there, that was the path of the coward, the wretch who believed in nothing.

He gathered his thoughts, prepared the message that he would send to his co-conspirators.

*

Two days later and Serat leaned over the edge of the westernmost of the Twin Colossi. The wind ripped at his hair, billowing under his clothes like a massive fist trying to yank him to his doom. He spat over the edge and retreated to the centre and squatted down beside his windrider, the beast having curled up, ducking low to hide itself from the roaring gale.

He hadn't wanted to fly too far, but neither had he wanted to lead his contact to the healing tents. They belonged to the Dagger and Totem clan and were not his secrets to give up. He would rather them think he was excessively paranoid to choose such a remote location, than implicate an innocent clan.  Not that they had a high standing in the Horde at the moment anyway...

He glanced up at the sun, which was tilting off its zenith. Past the time when he had expected his contact to show up. He patted the flank of his mount, which growled behind the grill of its facemask before letting its huge pink tongue flop onto his hand. The scratch of its tongue against his palm as it worked its way over his whole hand tickled and Serat chuckled, tousling the wyvern's mane.

A dark shadow passed overhead and Serat shot to his feet, dagger in his hand. Circling above him was a dire bat, its main body easily bulkier than that of any man and its wingspan immense, great leathery sails that glowed with the sun's light, the black veins as thick as vines.  Serat lowered his dagger, expecting to see a troll mounting the bat as it tilted around to land.

But there was none. Instead the creature swooped directly towards him in a brown streak, wings unfurling wide at the last moment so the bat dropped to the plateau in a heap, wings wrapped around itself like a cloak. The noises that came from within were of bones popping and cracking and the shape juddered and trembled. A moment later and the wings were swept back, revealing themselves to be no more than a leather cape and the figure of a troll emerged. It was the one Serat knew as Ogoun, his neck heavily weighted with wooden charms and his red hair styled into a proud Mohawk.

'Skintaker,' Serat hissed reverently.

'Shadow hunter,' Ogoun replied with a smirk.

To take the form of another creature, not just to inhabit its spirit like Serat did when he lashed across the plains as fast as a panther, but to steal its physical shape and power - that was deep magic of gristle and bone and muscle that had been thought lost for centuries.

Ogoun answered the unasked question: 'There be a lot of secrets that we trolls have hidden, Serat. We are the First People, don't you be forgetting that.'

Serat nodded, chastised and yet feeling a swell of pride for his people. Across from him, Ogoun pulled the cloak around his shoulders, covering himself up and squatted, motioning that Serat should join him.

'How you doing? You look well, should be proud. Ain't easy going through what you did, doing what you did.' Ogoun shook his head and touched his hand to Serat's arm. 'And don't you be worrying about your body none, we got some folk to burn a body round about the time, friend's and what. Far as anyone knows, you're as dead as can be.'

Serat nodded seriously, though to be honest he hadn't even considered the implications of his dead body disappearing from where it had been dumped. It boggled his mind to think that they might have kept a watch for that.

'But it's put us in a very unique situation, Serat.' Ogoun slid his hand over the shaven side of his scalp, licking his teeth noisily. 'As far as Orgrimmar is concerned, you's a dead man. They ain't gonna be looking for you no more. I don't think we could have planned it any better. You's a shadow in truth now, and I think we can use that.'

Serat stilled himself, didn't let any of the churning emotions appear on his face or in the movement of his body. He had been worried, afraid that Ogoun had come to cut him away, censure him for revealing himself to the agents of the Horde - call him a liability and exile him from the cause of Empire. But this... this was what he had been hoping for.

'So Serat, what do you say, you want to be in on the meeting with the Top Man?' Ogoun asked and Serat nodded immediately.

'I do. Whatever you need me to do, I'll do it.'

Ogoun clapped him on the shoulder roughly and grinned. 'That's the spirit, Serat! First things first, are you up to it?'

Serat thought about the question. He could bluster and boast like some child on their first hunt, but he knew that now was not the time for that. A plan such as the one he expected would require each piece to flow seamlessly into the next - it could not afford to stumble because someone exaggerated their capabilities for pride's sake.

So he flexed inwardly. His muscles and body he was confident in, it was his spiritual strength he had not tested. He gathered his will, and like a athlete stretching their limbs, he strained himself, pushed against his limits, to test whether they still stood as they had before his death. He tensed, soul feeling taut and close to snapping and he slowly let out a breath, relaxing, his pull on the ether loosening.

'I be ready boss,' said Serat.

Ogoun, who had watched the whole display in silence, nodded. 'Good. Then we need you in Sen'jin as soon as possible. Not in the village obviously, but nearby. We'll talk more once you are there.'

 _Sen'jin?_ Serat's brow furrowed with confusion. That was not the destination he had been expecting. Razor Hill perhaps, or the bluffs surrounding Orgrimmar.

'All respect, chief,' he started, working his tongue over his dry lips as he struggled with his words. 'But I think I earned to hear it here and now. You seen how loyal I can be, cut my own throat I did. For you, for this.'

Ogoun smacked his lips and narrowed his eyes and Serat feared that he had made a dreadful error. He had never been able to quite shake the fear of the more senior of his compatriots - the knowledge that they would murder him without a second thought to protect their secrets frightened him, and he walked on slippery stones when speaking to them, ever conscious of his precarious position.

'Can't say truer than that,' Ogoun eventually conceded, motioning him closer. Serat shuffled in, rubbing his hands together and trying to clear his thoughts, to make room for all the new information that would come quickly at him.

Then Ogoun began, laying out all the elements of a plan. The players, some of them who were familiar to Serat, such as Kotemu and Jese'Rai  - others that he had never heard of, suggesting a greater network than Serat had first thought. Deceptions and false leads unfolded and for a while Serat was stunned and elated by the cunning and breadth of the conspiracy, its audacity and ambition. But as Ogoun continued his monologue a tightness formed in Serat's guts. There was something wrong, the pieces of the plan were not fitting together in the way that he had envisioned - it was the wrong incantation for the result that he expected.

'...and that's when we do him, like we was orcs. Think about it Serat, the message it will send, the outrage that will burn. We'll make trolls see, and they'll join us in droves... armies.'

Serat's mouth was parched, but he had to know, had to hear it from Ogoun's lips. 'Him?'

Ogoun locked his eyes with a hard gaze, pinned him in place, challenged him with his fervour.

_'Vol'jin.'_

 

 


	6. The Heart of a Warrior

_'This kind of magic, it's been called a whole ream of things by all sorts of people, but it's all the same really_ (Serat lectured, winding a fibrous vine around his elbow and hand, glancing occasionally at the Witch as he picked his way across the ground). _The Drakkeri, they make 'em towering stone colossi, slow and heavy, sleepy guardians walking temples, altar and all. We jungle and island trolls, we lashed together wood and bone and mask to make the tiki warriors - capering imps that they was. In other places and other times there were the Bone Predators, for ritual hunts or Faces in the Rock to dispense rocky wisdom. Look different ey, feel different too - but you need to travel far sometimes to see it clear. Like climbing to the top of some peak and seeing that all those walls and boasts and fights ain't nothing, is all one land right? And I been everywhere, seen 'em all, sniffed the power in 'em. So it's all one magic - making a body for some spirit to live in and giving them the juice to move - no matter the differences on the skin of it._

_That's the key right, making the body; cause that tells the spirit what to  -be-. It be like any uniform yeah. When I put paint on my mask that shows me as a priest of the old Grandfather, but it also says I gotta behave like one. You want a hunter, you give 'em claws, you want the wisdom you give 'em a heart. So we gonna find the shape of a warrior._

_A mighty strong one.'_

*

The ground of the island - though it could be barely called that, a sandbar kept above the waves too long, colonised by palms and creepers and belligerent crabs - was soft and gritty, like it couldn't quite decide whether it was soil or sand. Its lay was broken by the humped sinuous tentacles of brown roots which mapped a web around the feet of the trolls that waited there impatiently.

'He's bolted,' one said cheerfully. 'He's up and run and left us with the big job.'

'He'll be here, fuckin' wait you sponge-brained paint drinker,' returned a gruff woman's voice.

'He's here,' Serat said, pushing aside ferns and stepping through. He answered Jese'rai's fierce grin and the cripplingly hard slap on his back with a sharp nod. He could not deny that he was nervous, but he was also girded for battle and that made him feel strong, inflated with confidence. Sheathed along his back, his twin daggers thrummed with captured spirits, grumpy in their new found prisons. Around him, invisible and eager, swam his murder spirits, fat with offerings of his blood and straining their leashes. His fetishes freshly painted, his gods pleased with his sacrifices and libations - Serat felt like his skin barely housed the storm within him.

Five pairs of trollish eyes blinked back at him. Ogoun was unchanged from their last meeting - brightly coloured wooden charms covered his chest and wrists and his ragged leather cape hid most of the rest of him. He stepped closer to Serat, looking him up and down critically. He tugged on a strap of Serat's leather armour and growled with what could have been approval.

'You know Jese'rai and Kotemu course,' the skintaker said, motioning to the two large trolls. Kotemu, massive as ever with his forest troll bulk, winked, briefly looking up from putting an edge onto a machete. Jese'rai blew him a kiss and waved her sword. She was wearing more armour than he had ever seen her in and looked as solid as a fortress. The shield strapped to her back was bright with Darkspear feathers and both of them were squeezed into the colours of Echo Island's elite.

Ogoun pointed to their left, at a troll who was grinning, all his teeth on show, his tusks mammoth long. This one seemed to have forgotten his clothes entirely, wearing little more than a loincloth. It exposed a wiry body, taut with muscles, with forearms like a tree branch strangled with vines. And scars. Every kind of scar a regenerating troll could acquire. He was leaning his chin on a the hilt of the biggest club Serat had ever seen outside of the hands of an ogre. It looked to have been shaped from a bone and was studded with fangs and claws and shards of black volcano glass, all wrapped with dry old rope. It hadn't been cleaned in what seemed to an age, and stank of gore and blood and shit. Serat wondered if he would even be able to lift it, let along swing the damn thing.

'That be Jun, he's our fist in all this,' Ogoun explained.

Serat caught up short. 'Not _Preacher_ Jun there?'

The skintaker nodded and the wild-eyed warrior smirked, his thick braids bristling up. Preacher Jun had the best reputation for being the worst headhunter trawling the steaming jungles of Stranglethorn. Not for lack of trying or skill, but because by the time he put down his monstrous club there wasn't much of a skull left to collect. He was a whirlwind, loa-touched and feared from jungle to shore, with a strange penchant for delivering rambling sermons on the eve of battle.

He was also unashamedly Gurubashi   - Serat had last heard of him as Mandokir's least reliable and most successful lieutenant.

He gave a hesitant wave.

'Gonna be a good day's work hey?' the Preacher said, lifting and then tossing his club from one hand, letting it spin and catching it again. Serat was mesmerized by the movement and couldn't find the words to answer.

'Put it away, Jun. We all know that's the only big bone you're carrying,' Jese'rai drawled, wriggling her thumb at the warrior while Kotemu snorted.

'Yeah?' Jun snapped back, dropping his club to the ground and fumbling with his loincloth. But before he could impress them all, Ogoun barked a censure.

'Jun! A shred of respect for the gravity of this here situation please.' The troll panted with exasperation. 'All godsdamned day... listen here, Serat. Last one to meet is him there. Motombe.' He gestured at the figure who was huddled some distance away, staring out over the waves, who turned at the sound of his name.

This troll was old - his pelt gone to gray and balding in most places anyway. Only his brows seemed to have retained their hair and from underneath them he stared at Serat with eyes that bulged like a murlocs. He was hunched under the weight of a long necklace made of skulls - of all races it appeared - each one marked with the face paint of a different major spirit. Hanging from straps and strings was an eclectic collection of gourds and flasks and it looked to Serat that the only thing that was keeping the grandfather on his feet was the plain wooden staff he clung onto. Two sad parrot feathers were its only adornment.

'Witchdoctor,' Serat nodded his head respectfully.

'Saadoohoontah,' Motombe grunted and Serat winced. The elder witchdoctor spoke in the most impenetrable  deep deep jungle dialect. Even other trolls thought these folk were a bit mad - ascetics who ate their meat raw and communed with the loas in week-long drug-fuelled binges. Where Ogoun had dug this wizened creature up from, Serat had no idea and wouldn't bet a clipped copper on which of the thousand gods he called his own.

Motombe was sniffing the air, his long nose pointed towards the clouds and nostrils flaring, a raptor picking up the scent. Serat furrowed his brow, but was pulled aside by Ogoun before he could make too much of it.

'So, everything in place, yeah?' The troll was excited, Serat could hear it in his voice and feel it in the way the fingers on his back squeezed him. In answer, he drew two wood and twine poppets from his belt. They were bulky representations of trolls but with all his other preparations Serat had not had the time to link them to their intended targets. Rather, there were two pigs on the mainland who were in for a nasty surprise should the poppets be used. He had to hope that the skeins of magic on the dolls would be enough to fool Ogoun. It _had_ to be enough.

'Dal'jin,' barked Motombe and Ogoun turned. Serat's ears perked up.

_Dal'jin...?_

'Doer sumwan it ear aboot,' Motombe coughed out, rasping through the words like they were hot rocks.

Everyone froze,  trying to translate the words in their heads. Serat figured it out a moment before Ogoun, or Dal'jin as he truly was, and in that instant, he could not master his face - his red eyes widening in panic. Their eyes met, Dal'jin's gaze boring deep into his mind, stripping past the bulwark of lies he had built. The noble troll features transformed from honest confusion to bone deep rage as he saw something treasonous in Serat's face. It was the mask of civility dropping away, leaving in its place something animal, primal and terrifying.

'You... you!' the skintaker spluttered, teeth bared, shoulders hunching. Serat wriggled himself out of his grip. There was no time to waste - only the confusion of the other trolls prevented them from leaping forward and cutting him down. Even now Kotemu was rising to his feet, long knives unsheathed and shining with violent gleams. Serat stretched out his arms and thrust with his power towards the ground. It was like a enormous weight slapped down onto the soil, a gust of air pulsing outwards, buffeting the trolls back, stinging their eyes with the wash of loose sand that was blown up.

_More power Whiteface... more_

His veins were worms crawling under his skin, thick with turgid blood as he strained, pouring his will and strength into the spirit trap he had made last night, activating the latent energies within and bending the captive creature to his purpose. Jese'rai swore and Kotemu leapt backwards as the billowing sand revealed colossal bones and skull. No, not bones, but the wooden and stone simulacrum of them, crude and linked by the fibrous lengths of vines, twice the height of any troll and ringed in painted glyphs. Serat spoke the word that gave them life and the ground at their feet boiled as the bones shifted, the tremor of consciousness, and then the sweeping movements of wakefulness. As the skeleton rose the soil and sand rose to meet it, flowing like water to become the flesh of the creature, forming muscles and skin, a face. A monstrous troll, its face leering and huge, ivory for its tusks, eyes burning flames. Serat's champion.

'Fight!' he commanded it.

Dal'jin roared, his anger staggering him as his body swelled and bulged larger and larger. He lurched towards Serat as bristles of red fur ripped through his skin. Dal'jin clawed at the skin of his face, horn-like nails tearing away the flaps of blue skin, revealing black and red and rage. He erupted from himself, high forehead and beady eyes squinting. He could not form words through the animal throat and  tusks that split his lips but he had no need, his bellow conveyed the meaning. Dal'jin tore his way out, bulging with the strength of his dire gorilla shape, desperate to cleave Serat limb from limb.

But before he could leap, Serat's colossus caught him with a swipe of one of its log-like arms, tossing the red gorilla through the air and crashing through the undergrowth. The colossus roared and gave chase, moving halfway through and halfway on top of the surface of the ground.

*

All the while through the birth of the golem, Jun had been jittering, clutching his hands to his skull and moaning quietly, a hissed argument with himself. As Jese'rai readied herself to strike at Serat alongside Kotemu, he suddenly straightened, rocking the mighty club Vulga into stance. The voices had said their piece, stories told and arguing done and done then.

'Sorry Jese,' he muttered, the killing grin appearing on his lips. With a grunt, he swung at the warrior woman, Jese just managing to throw her shoulder behind her shield at the monstrous mace slammed into it and even so, she was launched by the impact, sliding onto the sand but able to use her momentum to roll back to her feet.

'What are you doin'! Are ye mad man!?' She yelled, ducking and weaving beneath and around the wild swings of the Preacher's club.

Jun could only shrug, 'Don't really know and all that.' He sniggered as lashed out with his foot and kicked Jese to the ground. Great fun though.

*

Mizah opened her eyes. That had been a strange place to be, but the compulsion she had placed on Preacher Jun should be enough to keep the two of them busy for a little while at least. With any luck, they would kill each other and spare her the trouble.

She bared her teeth - not that she would mind the diversion.

Using her cobra headed staff, she pushed aside the sword-like leaves of the plants and stepped out of her hiding place.

'Dat deer da _witch_ aye smult,' spat someone and Mizah screwed up her face in a mixture of disgust and confusion. Was that meant to be Zandalari? That butchering of her beautiful native tongue - the language that had spawned the Chant of the Waking Dawn and the twelve faces of farce? She should kill the man just for that, let alone planning to kill the delightful Vol'jin.

The witchdoctor was jabbing one of his bony fingers in her direction, his other hand clacking its way through his necklace of skulls, seemingly looking for a specific one. Well, she was not going to stand here and watch him conjure some terrible jungle demon he had probably dreamed up while high on his own piss. She wetted her lips and pointed her staff at his chest. A curse of the great mother, one from the bottomless well of her dread wrath. A hex of scolding.

A clap and flash of gold and Motombe was reeling, flinching as if struck by a whip. He groaned and curled up around himself. A slap in the face by the hand of a god. Mizah cackled and sang out the hex again. Motombe's head snapped back and this time blood sprayed out from the impact. Stupid old man. Stupid and weak. She walked towards him, emphasising each step with another curse, beating the witchdoctor to his knees with her power, lashing him with golden light. When she was close enough, she whipped the heavy head of her staff into the hunched troll's jaw and kicked sand onto his fallen form.

He was muttering, clasping at something on his chest, mewling like a beaten cub. Pathetic. Mizah panted, letting her tongue loll out of her mouth, like she could lap up the bright red blood that was soaking into the sand. She had been hoping for something more. The way the Whiteface had been talking - had made this crew sound like the most dangerous half-dozen trolls in all the Empire. Her right arm was throbbing, like a panther wrapped too tight in a constrictor, things wriggled under her skin, wanting an way out of the maze she had trapped them in. She grazed her teeth over her lips, trying to think of the perfect cant with which to punish the witchdoctor.

Something permanent. It wasn't as if his gibbering could get any worse after all. She reached down to grasp his head, nails digging into his skin.

*

From out of the corner of his vision, Serat watched Mizah emerge from hiding and pummel Motombe to the ground. The old witchdoctor went down a whole lot easier than Serat had anticipated but so far, that was just about the only part that was going to plan. His colossus, his golem champion, had fucked off through the jungle after Dal’jin rather than crushing all the trolls. Jun and Jese’rai were still fighting sure enough, but neither one seemed capable of downing the other – Jese was hunkered down behind her shield while the Preacher battered her relentlessly – and there was only so long that Mizah’s compulsion on Jun would last. And what’s worse Kotemu wasn’t the type to just stand around watching the action.

The forest troll sprang towards Serat blades first. Serat just had time to draw his weapons before the razor-sharp edge of a machete zipped in front of his face, nicking the point of his nose. Kotemu was armed with his wide-blade machete and another, smaller curved kukri  and what’s more, he was faster, stronger and straight up better than Serat. Even with his spirit-enhanced speed and deftness, Serat struggled to parry the flashes of steel.

They crouched low, knives raised high and hissing. The worn grips of his weapons felt clammy in his hands and Serat blinked away sweat quickly.

_Not the eyes fool! The eyes of a killer don’t tell you shit!_

He chided himself, flicking his gaze from the cold anger in Kotemu’s eyes down to his thick green arms and torso. There! He just caught it, a pulse in the crook of his arm. He shrugged his shoulder under Kotemu’s thrust and got his black glass dagger between the knife and his ribs. He couldn’t stop the leg from cannoning into his knee and he cried out, dropping down.

Only the presence of the spirits saved him then, the vitality and agility they gifted him allowing him to throw himself back, the blade heading for his throat skittering along his collarbone, slashing deep into his pale flesh.

Serat ignored the sting, rolled back to his feet. Kotemu was too good. These feints and footwork the work of a master knife-fighter. And he fought dirty. How many names had Kotemu put to sleep in his years? Likely a list longer than Serat’s. He licked the blade of his bone dagger, heard the sizzle of the fiery ember spirit on his tongue, his eyes on Kotemu – the big troll edging closer. He knew it too, knew he was bigger and better and wanted to finish this. Got to say that for Kotemu, he wasn’t one to make a show of it. Serat growled. Well, he might not have been no knife fighter, but he was a shadow hunter.

And all trolls should know that they fight dirtiest of all.

He stepped into Kotemu’s reach, fending off the attacks as best he could, but tasting a goodly amount of them before falling into the forest troll’s hateful embrace. Kotemu’s rank breath bellowed in his face and he could feel the flecks of spittle splatter against him. Kotemu was straining like a bull, the edge of his blade dragging painfully up Serat’s side, Serat desperately trying but failing to hold back Kotemu’s strength.

But it was enough, that was all he needed, enough.

He rolled his tongue in his mouth, making a tube of it. Then he breathed.

A gout of liquid flames spewed out, directly onto Kotemu’s face. There was nothing he could done, no way to dodge the fire, not from that close. The big troll shrieked and fell back, battering and flailing at his melting face and chest. He twisted and corkscrewed in place, keening all the while before his lungs filled with fire and he fell face first to the sand, twitching sporadically.

Serat dropped to one knee, feeling hollowed out, the sting of his wounds growing worse and more insistent with each thudding beat of his heart. His blood dripped from his fingers onto the sand, absorbed in a moment. The earth, where the Baron waited for all men, always so thirsty for blood.

Not a problem though, if there was one thing this world wasn’t about to run short of, it was blood.

*

The screams of the fat forest troll were distracting her from her considerations and in frustration she hexed the witchdoctor again, cackling at his cringing abasement. Though there was something missing – it was not as satisfying as she had hoped it would be. She leaned over and jabbed the crystalline point of her stave into the meat of Motombe’s thigh. Nope, no reaction, not even the merest of yelps – he was not playing along and Mizah didn’t like that.

Suddenly he was staring right at her, but instead of pupils those bulging eyes were wholly white, eyes rolled back into his head. The witchdoctor brought his palm flat up in front of his mouth, covered in some powder. It was then that Mizah felt the power churning at her feet, but by then it was too late – he blew and she breathed.

It was stinging stuff. In her eyes, her throat, nose. In her lungs. She staggered back, batting at the air blindly, trying to choke it out of her system. In front of her Motombe rose to his feet like he was being pulled up by strings, hoarse voice chanting ceaselessly, the skulls on his chest echoing his words in their own hollow tones, their mandibles clacking.

The last thing she saw of the real world was an immense, ghostly skull clamping down over her. Then she was tossed screaming into the recesses of her psyche.

*

Jese’rai ducked under a swing that would have taken her head off. She was panting like a mating bull, her arms felt like a blacksmith’s anvil must feel like after a long day of smithing and the Preacher was still grinning. He was gasping for every breath sure enough, but even then he did not look like was close to slowing down. He must have been born swinging that wretched club, his muscles were like a jungle tree, rock-breaking and tireless. She was not. She had been born a girl troll and about as far from a sword as a whelp could be. She had only taken up weapons five years ago at that – tired of her brothers calling her the useless one and tired of her pa seeing her as something between a servant and a dog. Too empty headed they said. Listened to too many orc ideas they said. Well, they were sleeping with the Baron now, each and all, and she was building a better Empire.

Would be, if the Preacher didn’t bury her first.

Then he staggered and his club fell from nerveless fingers. No one would accuse Jese’rai of letting an opportunity skip on by and she weren’t about to miss this one. She unfolded from behind her shield, swinging high but expecting a duck that did not come. Her sword cut into Jun’s neck just under the jaw and sheared clean through. About the only piece of good luck these entire cluster fuck of a day.

The Preacher waddled a few headless steps then went and died good and proper.

Jese whirled, her blood hot.

_Where was that snake Whiteface!_

*

 _She was a loud-mouthed brat again, or was it a solemn eyed old crone? Or were those the callous hardened hands of her first lover at the ends of her arms? Was this her first hut or the edge of the jungle? The heights of the Zandali ziggurats? She heard happiness and tasted terror. Or maybe it was all those things at once. Mizah concentrated, trying to centre herself and fight the disorientation. She gripped onto her core identity, who she_ knew _she was and kept it safe within her while wearing it around her like an armour. This wasn’t anywhere she hadn’t ventured before, the mindscape – this was_ her _realm. She was the master of it, not the other way around. But there was something different laced through it, a wrongness like biting into a fruit and finding half a worm wriggling._

_Then she looked up._

_The roof/sky/canopy was filled by an immense dragonfly, rainbow hued, an assault on perspective. Motombe’s loa. If it had a name, Mizah did not know it and couldn’t have said it even if she did. Its endless iridescent wings stretched from horizon to horizon, from the heights of her hopes and ambitions to the darkest pits of her hidden fears and hates. Its multifaceted eyes reflected every aspect of her, leaving her bare, literally naked here and defenceless. Its chittering jaws mashed together hungrily._

_She sensed the power of the curse that Motombe had unleashed buffeting against her. It was breaking down the divisions of her mind, allowing all that she was to flow and mix together into an unmanageable melange. A potent cocktail of unrestrained dreams and unconnected thoughts that the dragonfly godling would then drink down. The sweetest of nectars._

_The grin tugged up the corners of Mizah’s lips. And after she had spent so long erecting all those barriers and walls within herself. Some people had no appreciation of hard work. She could see it happening already, a dark shadow blanketing the dreamscape, an unexpected eclipse. Things fuzzed at the edges as power flooded her limbs, draping her in the blackest robes, and as the real invaded back into her vision._

_No point keeping them waiting, Mizah reckoned and she brought her right wrist up to her teeth. She found the spot and bit deep, blood welling up and trickling over the intricate tattoos there, cutting through the bindings and wards and collapsing the labyrinth she had meticulously created to contain her dark side._

_In the sky above the dragonfly loa gave a shrill cry_

Mizah snapped back to reality, on her hands and knees. Shadows blossomed from the bite on her arm, a mantle of darkness settling over her, as if the sun would not claim her. There was a feral glint in her eye as she looked up, a malevolent cast to her features. There was the sound of leathery wings flapping around her, but no motion.

‘Idiot,’ she spat, flinging her arm out.

Across the ground shadows raced, flitting like bolts from a crossbow. Nothing slammed into Motombe and flung him to his back. He beat at nothing, hands trying to grab and tear, but on the sand his silhouette battled with indistinct tentacled things that tore off pieces of the gloom-stuff itself. Bit by bit, his shadow was ripped to pieces and Motombe’s struggles faltered then ceased.

She pushed herself to her feet, pulling the shadows back within herself, though it would take much more to bury them properly. Though she really didn’t feel in any great rush to do that. She was flush with power and there were still things to torment. She snatched up one of the shade flakes of Motombe that were fluttering in the air like leaves in the wind. With malicious pleasure she tore it slowly in two. Maybe not have hurt of Motombe any more, not with where he was, but it sure felt good doing it all the same. She licked her fingers clean of the mind sap.

As she had suspected – piss and madness.

*

Serat straightened up. He had seen Jese hack the head from Preacher Jun and knew she would be looking to do him next. Mizah was done with Motombe and sauntered over to his side, casual as you like. She was standing in clear sunlight, but for some reason looked like she was walking in the deepest cave, light slipping aside before it landed on her. Made his eyes hurt looking at it but wasn’t the time to be wondering about that. Chalk it up to another of the endless mysteries of magic. Plenty of other things hurt just enough more anyhow.

‘You fucking coward, traitor shit Whiteface!’

Not the most eloquent of insults, but Serat didn’t suppose he deserved them from her.

‘You made vows Serat. I heard you swear them, and now I seen you spit all over them, goat fucker.’ Jese’rai raged, banging her sword on her battered shield. If she was tired from fighting Jun, she didn’t look it. Looked like the fight had just made her mad instead. Killing friends will do that to you.

‘It ain’t like that Jese and you know it.’ Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t. But Serat had promised himself he wouldn’t kill any more trolls and he had broken that promise today. Three good people dead and maybe more to come. Not if he couldn’t give it a try Jese’rai. She at least liked him.

Well, she had liked him.

‘Do you know what we’re meant to be doing here Jese? We’re meant to kill _Vol’jin_!’ He pleaded with her, had to make her see what was wrong with that. ‘Him that saw as safe when we lost all our homes. You’re as Darkspear as me, you know he’s never done us a wrong turn.’

‘Cept one,’ Jese snapped back, pacing like a tiger.

Serat’s chest fell. ‘Cept one.’

‘And that’s why it’s got to be him. Fuck Serat! You know this better than me. I thought you knew this!’ And he heard it then, heard how much his turning had hurt her – a friend you thought you could fall back on siding with the enemy. ‘Ain’t no one the Darkspear love more than Vol’jin. And whose life is bigger than Empire, Serat? _Whose?_ ’

They had shared the answer enough times. But it didn’t have the same power as when you were talking of your own, what you were willing to give for the dream. So much different than what you are willing to take for the dream. He shook his head.

‘Not like this, Jese, won’t let it be like this. A blood fucked lie.’

She clenched her jaw, knuckles white around the grip of her sword.

‘Whiteface, if you can’t do it, won’t you allow me,’ Mizah drawled eagerly at his side, avarice glinting in her dark eyes.

Everyone flinched at the sound of a horrendously howling and crashing, and Serat’s golem appeared from the trees. It was badly battered, gouges ripped from its sandy flesh and one arm completely missing. As it stumbled towards them, chunks of itself sloughed from the body, billows of sand gusting away and hunks of branch falling free. It tumbled to the ground, trying to heave itself at Serat’s feet but failing. The magic left it, the trapped spirit frayed and worn to shreds by the violence, limping out of its cage that was once more a bundle of sticks and stones.

Dal’jin followed in its wake. Larger than ever, fur matted with blood but victorious, the gorilla tossed the twig mesh that had encased the golem’s heart at Serat. Then, rearing onto his hind legs he beat at his chest and roared his terrifying dominance. The fangs receded in his face, and fur moulted away. Black skin became dark cape and the rest was peeled away to reveal the skintaker beneath. The rage remained though.

‘What makes you think you get to _choose_ , Serat?’ Dal’jin yelled.

Serat gestured at the strewn bodies, trying to at least look like the hard man he didn't feel much like.

'Think the Baron's toll gives me a say in the matter, Dal'jin,' he said matter-of-factly, pulse pounding in his ears.

'Dal'jin. That isn't a Darkspear name now is it?' Mizah asked abruptly, to everyone's silent astonishment. She shook her head in the manner  of an impatient  tutor. 'Oh no, that's some old Zandali there isn't it? "Dal", sight or thought. "Dal'jin", Visionary. Strange that no, a Zandali leading Darkspear against their chief.' She shrugged.

'What do you know of it woman?' Dal'jin snapped back, exasperated, words slurring as his teeth shifted shape within his mouth. His words earned him a sharp look from Jese'rai.

Mizah just cocked her head, cupping her hand beside her ear. 'Know enough to know those are stroke drums from war canoes, fool.'

Serat jolted. So it wasn't just him that heard the pounding. And now he bent his head to it he could hear it too, the steady _boom boom_ of war canoes, the beat getting louder with each stroke. Canoes like that could hold twenty braves to a boat. He grinned a cobra's greeting.

'You want to stay and see what Vol'jin thinks about all this then?' he asked the skintaker, who tore his gaze away to glance over his shoulder. The anger was dying now, replaced. Not with fear though, just cunning.

Finally Dal'jin bellowed, stamping the ground in a show of frustration. He pointed a finger at Serat and Mizah.

'I don't forget.'

Serat made a show of it, holding the gaze and spitting like he bore a hundred such grudges. Mizah, for her part, did not seem to care, only disappointed she was not wearing his entrails as a necklace and using his spine for a staff.

Words said, threats promised, Dal'jin leapt into the air, cape catching the wind and pulling him into the sky, his bat form taking him. He circled once and then swooped, powerful talons opening and grasping Jese'rai around her upper arms, carrying her off into the sky.

Serat slumped. Not dead, not yet. He just wanted to lie down in the sand and let it drink him up , spirits take the rest of them. But Mizah prodded at his shoulder.

'Eh, get yourself up, Whiteface. Won't go any better for us if they catch us here with all this less you got the tallest of tall tales in that pretty little head of yours.' Spirits damn her mouth, but she was right. There was no explanation worth the salt in his spit that would get them free of the Darkspear protectors should they get their paws on them. Not with three dead bodies and one wearing the colours of the Isle.

He stood and took a deep breath. He supposed he had a little left in the bottom of his gut. He offered a grateful grin to the Witch who had stood by him after he had just about alienated every side of the conflict.

'Lead the way Mizah.'

*

_'Don't you think it's at all strange, Serat? That one troll leader turns down Zandalar's offer and later a Zandali, not some grunt either, turns up with a plan to kill him? Maybe they saw a way to get rid of the fly in their cauldron and you just got caught in the web. I don't know. Think about it.'_

_He thought about it._


End file.
